Dear Donald, We Need to Talk

Illustration by Max Yeager

*Knock, knock*

"What is it?" Donald Trump yells from behind a solid gold door adorned with with the preserved hearts of Sumerian kings.

"Hi, Mr. Trump. I know you're really busy with the elections, but we need to talk."

"I'm not a talker, I'm a doer," Trump says, taking a long sip from a martini glass filled with Mexican tears and garnished with the fingers of destitute Chinese businessmen.

"Yes, I know Mr. Trump, but this is important. It's about the wall."

"Please, the wall's easy, you're wasting my time."

"Well, Mr. Trump, I believe you can do it, but I just thought I'd run the numbers by you."

"Numbers," Trump chuckles, lighting a cigar off the burning wing of a bald eagle. "Do you think Reagan cared about numbers?"

"I...I'm not sure, I was born in 1993. Listen, just let me run these calculations by you, and perhaps you can consider revising the policy."

Trump sighs.

"One second."

Trump opens a drawer in his desk and produces a small Latino boy. He lays him on his stomach across the diamond-encrusted desktop, arranging a delightful spread of cheeses and dried fruits across the boy's back. He takes a large bite of brie before leaning back in his panda leather chair.

"Proceed," he says.

"Well, Mr. Trump, we've been running some figures based off of the current market for materials and labor to build the wall. We estimated the height at about 30 feet, does that sound reasonable?"

"How high can Mexicans jump?" Trump asks through a mouthful of caviar-coated figs. "I know they've got those beans."

"I'm not sure, Mr. Trump, but I don't think 30 feet. Since you take so much inspiration from the Great Wall of China, we figured it would have to be a double wall."

"You know it's 13,000 miles long?"

"I…no, it's not. Anyway, the cost right now per square foot for value-priced bricks is about $9.04. At 316,800 total square feet per each mile for the double wall, that's $2,863,872 worth of material per mile. At around 2,000 miles of border, that's about $5,727,747,000 worth of materials."

"Is that supposed to scare me? I'm worth over $10 billion."

"Well, I'm afraid that's just the tip of the iceberg. For average-paid masons, the price of labor per square foot is about $42.53. That's $13,473,504 per mile of the double wall, or $26,947,008,000 for the entirety of the wall. For a total cost of $32,674,755,000 just to build the wall. And that's not even factoring in the cost of buying land rights to build on private property, or to maintain the wall."

"Well, this is cute," Trump says, wiping his mouth with a tattered segment of the Shroud of Turin, "but none of this matters."

"Mr. Trump?"

"Well, son," Trump says with a smile that has laid civilizations to dust and thrown men headlong into the mouth of madness, "Mexico's going to pay for the wall."

"Mr. Trump, that's 10 percent of their total budget in 2014."

"And?"

"Well, Mr. Trump, that would likely devastate their economy, and lead to even more trying to cross into America."

"Well, what about the blacks?" Trump says, biting into a Faberge Egg like a goddamn apple. "I've always had a good relationship with the blacks."

"I…what? No, Mr. Trump, what I mean is maybe the wall isn't the best idea."

"But they're bringing drugs and crime over the border."

"Well, actually, we've done some studies, and it seems that illegal immigrants are actually less likely than natives to commit violent crimes. And plus, the cartels have planes, tunnels and submarines."

"Okay, egghead," Trump says, stroking a baby marmoset gently in his hands before crushing it with one firm clench, "What do you suggest?"

"Well, working with just about the same amount of money, you could make half of all public college tuition free."

"You're fired."